Tuesday made me believe November will be the last gasp for the teabag movement

[jmowreader]

Our primary was Tuesday. The teabaggers came out in force and stomped incumbents and non-teabag challengers to the ground. OMG! It's a tea party revolution! They'll be here forever!

Except that they won't. The TOTAL turnout in the Idaho primary was only 27 percent, and some of the teabaggers won by real thin--five or six percent--margins.

My thinking on this: The tea party people probably came out en masse. They claim to be real politically active, so you can bet a great majority of them showed up at the polls. I don't think they all came out, but it's probably close to 85 percent of the total teabag population. The people they put on the ballot are some real nutcases--one of them brags about authoring a bill that will cause the state to mint one-ounce silver medallions from Idaho-mined silver (which will make us a lot of money), and for those medallions to be valid for the payment of taxes. In the bill it cites the paragraph in the Constitution which prohibits states from accepting anything but gold or silver coinage as payment for debt but misses the part two commas ahead of it that prohibits states from coining their own money.

Truth be told, most people--not just in Idaho, but anywhere--are not that extreme. Right now, a political column in the Spokesman-Review (I don't remember it being in the Press, and I would have seen it) lists Idaho as "leans Democratic." If the Teabaggers drive Idaho leftward--say, putting a Democrat in the ID-2 seat--the national Republican Party will work overtime to kill the tea movement.

Right now? I think we'll lose no more than five seats in the House, lose maybe one in the Senate, and, depending on the viciousness of the teabaggers, may gain some.